Avari Blog

Our Story: From RetentionGrid to AVARI

[fa icon="calendar"] Feb 18, 2018 / by Kevin Dykes

paintthebus

Painting a moving bus. Changing a wing while in flight. These are phrases our team has heard daily from me as we’ve navigated the past two years of fast growth. RetentionGrid was born on the cusp of a renaissance of data-driven marketing technology. As such, continual evolution and change has been the one constant. Yet despite a fiercely competitive environment, we are thriving…

...And today we are announcing a major market expansion and a focus-in on the technology that has been the driving force in our growth: real-time predictive content in email. It is the culmination of the past two years of work and is positioning us for truly massive growth. A few key points in our strategy:

  • Focus on our automated predictive personalization technology delivered into emails at time of open (predictive analytics + advertising technology).
  • Extend our reach beyond eCommerce and make our cutting-edge technology available to all email marketers to focus on predictive content for any kind of company.
  • Partner directly with ESPs and Marketing Automation software companies as go-to-market partners, enabling them to offer predictive dynamic content to their customers almost overnight
  • Launch a completely new brand that supports our broader market offering and highlights the exciting predictive personalization technology that has been quietly in use by customers since August of 2014. New name, new company descriptions, new website, all new messaging and marketing materials—relaunching everything with a small team in near record time.

The pace of the past eight weeks in our final run has been mind-blowing as we lead up to today. Our team of 18 employees has executed the mission with expert precision. I’m very proud of what we’ve pulled off in such short time!

Welcome to AVARI

avari_brand

AVARI enables you to personalize in the moment with real-time predictive content in email. Marketers send one campaign with AVARI dynamic content, using any email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation, and recipients get millions of unique combinations of content that are predictively personalized for each one.
The AVARI Predictive Recommendation Engine with Open-Time Personalization automatically injects recommended products, lifecycle offers, live social feeds, and other content into emails, on the fly.
AVARI partners with ESPs and agencies to bring predictive email personalization to online businesses and publishers worldwide. AVARI serves more than 7,000 businesses in 59 countries with 10 million consumers in 187 countries.

How We Got Here

Let me step back a bit and tell you more about how we got here.

 timeline_blog

V1: Lifecycle Segmentation

RetentionGrid launched as a partner in the Shopify app store in April 2013 as a customer lifecycle analytics solution for eCommerce businesses. The app immediately resonated with shops; by pressing one button, it connected to their entire histories, helping them to see all of their customers in one place and understand the various stages in the lifecycle, as well as guiding them on how to best communicate with each segment of customers.

V2: Predictive Analytics

Almost exactly one year ago, we launched our Predictive Analytics solution, which had been developed in partnership with SAP. This first solution added predictive customer segmentation and predictive product recommendations and kicked off 12 months of rapid growth.

V3: Predictive Personalization in Email and Becoming AVARI

Seven months ago, we began to develop V3 of our company, which is being introduced as AVARI today. Over the past year, we’ve played every role in helping shops take advantage of the RetentionGrid technology—from being the ESP, to providing agency-like services such as strategy, design, and campaign execution. And, of course, as a predictive personalization technology provider.

We’ve done it all and learned what it takes to drive significant new revenue and keep customers coming back. We learned that the future of the email personalization space was ripe for a new solution—automated personalization that made it dead simple for any marketer to add predictive content to any email. As we move forward, we’ll be using all that we’ve learned in playing these roles to support the ecosystem of agencies, ESPs, and the brands we all serve as the ultimate customer.

“In a world in which emails become skeletal frameworks, the way marketers think about and create these messages will shift. Email marketers will first set up the basic design framework of the email, which will include things like the header, footer and content areas, and then build dynamic rules for virtually all of the content areas in the email. Shifting to data-driven email frameworks will help marketers to increase the relevance of their messages, which in turn can improve overall success metrics.”

- MediaBUZZ


Email is evolving at a rapid pace, and we are proud to be at the forefront of that change. Our team is excited to be on the ride of our lives!

Topics: AVARI

Kevin Dykes

Written by Kevin Dykes

Kevin is a Co-Founder and the CEO at AVARI, where he is in charge of talking to customers, shaping strategy, and forging partnerships. He’s been building web technology companies since 1996, with a primary focus on product, go-to-market, strategy, and growth. He is father to two gorgeous girls and enjoys college basketball and BBQing.